A post - 90s professor from Peking University set a record by securing the largest financing in embodied intelligence, amounting to 1.1 billion, with CATL leading the investment.

Robot Outlook reported on June 23rd that today, Galaxy Universal announced the completion of a new round of financing worth 1.1 billion RMB led by CATL. This round of financing attracted top investors such as the strategic investment arm of the listed company CATL, CATL Capital, Guokai Kechuang of the China Development Bank, Beijing Robot Industry Fund, and GGV Capital.

This is the largest single - round financing in the domestic embodied large - model robot field so far and has also set a record for the highest cumulative financing amount in the field of embodied intelligence.

Galaxy Universal was founded in May 2023 and has completed a total of 6 rounds of financing, with the total financing amount exceeding 2.4 billion RMB.

Wang He, the founder of Galaxy Universal, was born in 1992. He graduated from the Department of Electronic Engineering at Tsinghua University with a bachelor's degree and then went to Stanford University to pursue a doctoral degree under the guidance of Professor Leonidas J. Guibas, a member of three major academies in the United States.

In September 2021, Wang He returned to China and joined Peking University. He served as an assistant professor and doctoral supervisor at the Frontier Computing Research Center of the School of Computer Science, founded and led the Embodied Perception and Interaction Laboratory at Peking University, and established and served as the director of the Embodied Intelligence Research Center at the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence in 2022.

In January this year, Galaxy Universal launched GraspVLA, the world's first end - to - end embodied large model pre - trained on billions of simulated synthetic action data. This model has achieved the world's first zero - shot generalization ability through pre - training alone.

Galaxy Universal also released GroceryVLA, the world's first end - to - end model for retail commercialization. It enables robots to accurately grasp all kinds of products such as soft bags, hard boxes, bottles, glass containers, and plastic packages in shelf scenarios with a wide variety of densely stacked products without the need to adjust parameters for each individual product.

In addition to the operation model, Galaxy Universal also launched the product - level end - to - end navigation large model TrackVLA, whose capabilities cover pure visual environment perception and natural language instruction understanding, zero - shot generalization ability in complex scenarios, and high - dynamic target following.

In terms of the large - scale application of robots, Galaxy Universal has made some progress in scenarios such as smart retail, industry, and health care.

In March this year, Galaxy Universal released the world's first intelligent retail solution for humanoid robots. The wheeled dual - arm robot Galbot can perform the entire automated process of inventory, replenishment, retrieval, delivery, and packaging of 5,000 product categories, 6,000 aisles, and more than 10,000 boxes of products in a 50 - square - meter unmanned store around the clock. It only takes 1 day to deploy a new store.

Currently, nearly ten stores in Beijing have been deployed and are in normal operation, and it is expected to be put into use in 100 stores across the country within this year.

In addition, Galaxy Universal jointly established a joint - venture company with Boyuan Capital under the global industrial giant Bosch Group and signed a tripartite strategic memorandum with Bosch China and Boyuan Capital. This cooperation will focus on industrial manufacturing scenarios and jointly promote the exploration of commercial applications of embodied intelligent robots and their entry into the global market.

This article is from the WeChat official account “Robot Outlook”. Author: Xu Lisi, Editor: Mo Ying. Republished by 36Kr with permission.